Given the name PRISM, the logo artist may have felt limited to...well...to using a prism in some way.It doesn't matter whether we, the masses, take it seriously.Why does a government surveillance program need a logo?

There are two terms that all government contractors know make government department heads moist. One is "social media." The other is "branding."

This is not to say that government department heads know what these terms mean. They don't. They just know that they're important, somehow, and so want to throw at them in order to bring efficiency to government,

What I suspect happened here is that some contractor realized there were no "social media" possibilities for this project, and so doubled down on the branding aspect.

Pocket Ninja:Secret Agent X23:Why does a government surveillance program need a logo?

There are two terms that all government contractors know make government department heads moist. One is "social media." The other is "branding."

This is not to say that government department heads know what these terms mean. They don't. They just know that they're important, somehow, and so want to throw at them in order to bring efficiency to government,

What I suspect happened here is that some contractor realized there were no "social media" possibilities for this project, and so doubled down on the branding aspect.

I used to work directly for a government agency and step 1 for getting funding for any new project was coming up with a cool acronym. It didn't matter what you wanted to do, if you couldn't slap a good name on it you may as well be wishing for unicorns. A colleague of mine had suggested "T.A.M.P." for one of our projects, which was a pretty accurate description of the project, but it was a horrible acronym. Everyone looked at him like a dog that had just shiat on the rug.

I'm sure the guy who thought up PRISM was beside himself with glee. That's promotion material right there.

"The splitter would imply that the government has set up infrastructure that is comparable to Google's to handle all that traffic and all that data. ... Last I checked the slide set mentioned a budget of $20 million, so that doesn't match," Adida said, suggesting it would cost far more than that for the government to maintain such an infrastructure. More likely, Adida said the documents leaked to the press detail an NSA program to streamline its processes for requesting data from tech companies under warrants issued by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. "I know these systems pretty well," said Adida. "My speculation is that these companies have set up automated systems for FISA requests to be sent to them and then automated systems for returning the data in some kind of standard fashion back to the requesters."

[snip]

Adida said that the "very strong denials" issued by the tech companies implicated in the leaked documents and the fact that Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Twitter have joined together to ask the government to allow them to release more details about the FISA requests they receive makes him "optimistic" that the program is not as sweeping as early reports suggested.

Seems that the more we hear on this system after the initial Snowden leaks, the more limited it seems to be.

Shaggy_C:It's like this in any large bureaucracy. Internal marketing is in many cases as important as the actual intent behind a project. If you can't sell it to management you're not going to get funded.